We won the Vote. Now Our Own City Won’t Enforce It.

By Ashley Stahl

Originally publish at The Roaring Fork Tranny

Glenwood Springs revoked the permit for the ICE detention facility on Midland Avenue. The fight now is getting the City to follow its own rules. Join us at City Council on Thursday, June 18.

On April 28, 2026, something happened in Glenwood Springs that almost never happens. Our Planning and Zoning Commission looked at the evidence, listened to its neighbors, and voted 5 to 1 to revoke the permit that allowed an ICE immigration detention facility to operate at 100 Midland Avenue. After twenty-two years, the local authorization for that facility is gone.

We should be clear about what that vote means, because it is not small. The permit was revoked because the facility broke a core condition it agreed to when it opened: it held people far past the twelve-hour limit the permit was built around. Federal records documented this at least eight times in 2025. People were kept in windowless cells with only metal seats and cold air, well beyond the point where the law says a short-term holding room is no longer enough.

The operator did not respond to the notice of violation. The landlord did not respond. The federal government did not respond. None of them showed up to the hearing. None of them appealed by the deadline. The revocation is final and uncontested. As of today, the building at 100 Midland Avenue has no valid permit for any detention use at all.

So we should be celebrating. And we are. But we have to be honest about how we got here, and about what is happening now.

The City did not do this. We did.

For twenty-two years, the City of Glenwood Springs held the building file for that facility. It sat in a drawer. It showed an expired temporary certificate of occupancy, fire safety orders that were never enforced, and no record that a final inspection had ever been done. Nobody at the City acted on it.

It took neighbors filing public records requests to pull that file into the light. It took volunteers, many of them giving their nights and weekends for free, to assemble the building code analysis, the fire safety record, and the legal argument. It took more than 160 people filling the hearing room and overflowing the overflow space to make the case in person. And even then, City staff stood up and recommended against revoking the permit. Five commissioners listened to the community instead. That is the only reason the vote went the way it did.

Why this is not over

Here is the part that should bother every resident of this city, no matter how you feel about immigration.

The Commission revoked the permit. But the City is now refusing to enforce its own decision, and its own building and fire codes, against the landlord who owns the building. At the hearing, the City Attorney told the Commission that the Supremacy Clause, the part of the Constitution that gives federal law priority, prevents any enforcement action.

That argument is aimed at the wrong party. The building at 100 Midland Avenue is not federally owned. It is private property, owned by an out-of-state company. Federal protections shield the federal tenant. They do not shield a private landlord from local building, fire, and zoning rules. The federal government’s own regulation says so in plain language: leased buildings are subject to local code requirements and inspection. Every other business in this town has to follow these codes. This one does not, only because its tenant carries a federal badge.

And there is a separate problem the City keeps stepping around. The building operated from 2005 to 2026 with no valid final certificate of occupancy. Two fire marshal orders from 2025 were never enforced. A detention facility is supposed to meet the strictest fire and life safety standards in the code, because the people locked inside cannot escape a fire on their own. None of that has ever been verified. The certificate the City produced on the morning of the hearing does not fix it. It lists a building classification that does not exist, cites a permit that expired years ago, and was signed by a building inspector rather than the building official who actually holds the authority to issue it.

One more thing worth asking out loud. The City Attorney now telling the Council its hands are tied is the same attorney who approved this permit back in 2004 and advised the City through all twenty-two years of non-enforcement. We have raised that as an unresolved conflict-of-interest question, and we think the Council deserves to know it.

What we are asking for

This is not complicated, and it does not require a single new law. We are asking the City to do the ordinary work it is already required to do.

When you come to City Council, ask them to:

1. Enforce the revocation now. Direct staff to act against the unpermitted detention use. Every day it operates without a permit is a fresh violation.
2. Run the building and fire code track that has been ignored. Require proof the building actually meets detention-grade life safety standards before anyone is held there again.
3. Stop treating the last-minute certificate of occupancy as proof of safety. Require the missing inspection records, or correct or revoke it.
4. Apply the rules equally. A federal tenant is not a loophole. The owner is private, and the codes apply.
5. Answer the community in writing, on the record, with a timeline. Silence after formal notice becomes part of the legal record.

If the City keeps refusing, the community has reserved its right to ask a court to compel these officials to do their jobs. We would rather not get there. We would rather our own government simply enforce the law it already passed.

Show up

All businesses deserve to be treated equally. People who rent to the federal government do not deserve special treatment from our building, fire, and zoning codes. That is the whole argument, and it is one this city should be able to agree on across every other difference.

Glenwood Springs City Council Thursday, June 18, 2026, at 6:15 PM City Council Chambers, City Hall, 101 W. 8th Street

Sign up to speak in person at the meeting. Bring a neighbor. Three minutes at the microphone, multiplied across a full room, is how we got the vote. It is how we finish the job.

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